Catapult Explosive Fruits And Vegetables At Your Enemies In Picnic Wars HD
Picnic Wars™ HD ($1.99) by Chillingo Ltd is one of those games that’s better in concept than in reality. It’s a catapult-style game where the goal is to destroy the enemy bunker with your ammo - which is food. You’re either on team fruit or team vegetable, and the enemy is the alternate faction.
This game felt like it had a lot of wasted potential. Who wants to throw fruits and vegetables in an all out food battle when you can throw tastier objects like pies, cheeseburgers, and mashed potatoes? I can’t help but think the developers were a bit short sighted on this one.
You start out on the side of the vegetables, and attacking the fruit tower is done with your catapult. Loading is done by tapping a vegetable in your patch (you begin with mushrooms and tomatoes) and then tapping the catapult to launch it. You can move the catapult from front to back and to the side, but you’re not doing the aiming Angry Birds style.
This set up is actually incredibly awkward, and it’s not that much fun to play because you have so little control over the launching process. Why anyone would make a catapult game that’s not like Angry Birds baffles me, since it’s a system that works so well. Essentially, all you do in this game is tap, though there is a bit of strategy involved in placing your catapults on the map, since they have a limited range and there are specific targets that you need to hit.
I had a serious issue with the zoom controls, because you need to zoom out to set everything up, but as the catapult launches, it zooms back in, without returning to your previous setting. That meant there was a lot of zooming in and out and scrolling, which was tedious. Gameplay is also quite slow, and there’s a lot of downtime waiting between shots and waiting for the game to load between levels.
You’re limited to a few vegetables in the beginning of Picnic Wars, but as the game progresses you earn new types of vegetables to fight with, and the towers become more intricate. You will have to choose your vegetables carefully, because each one has a different explosive outcome. Vegetable seeds are planted alongside your catapults and you only have a limited amount (aka a finite amount of ammo), so you must choose what you plant wisely.
There are always several different fort areas to hit, but the main goal is to squish all of the fruit. When you’ve finished the vegetable levels you get to switch to team fruit and do the opposite.
I played this on the new iPad, and I’m not sure if it was the Retina display or just plain crummy graphics, but I wasn’t impressed with the art style of Picnic Wars. It looked pixellated and poorly done, especially compared to other apps, but I didn’t have an iPhone copy so I’m not sure how it looks on the smaller screen.
Picnic Wars has 64 levels with 23 types of fruits and vegetables, but honestly, as far as catapult games go, this one just doesn’t stack up. It doesn’t have Game Center achievements, the gameplay just isn’t that great, and the graphics are less than ideal. All in all, I’d recommend skipping this game and spending your pennies on a more worthwhile release.
